Brown Eyed Handsome Man

The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry

Bruce Pegg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135356910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry draws on dozens of interviews done by the author himself and voluminous public records to paint a complete picture of this complicated figure. This biography uncovers the real Berry and provides us with a stirring, unvarnished portrait of both the man and the artist. Berry has long been one of pop music's most enigmatic personalities. Growing up in a middle-class, black neighborhood in St. Louis, his first major hit song, "Maybellene, " was an adaptation of a white country song, wedded to a black-influenced beat. Thereafter came a string of brilliant songs celebrating teenage life in the '50s, including "School Day, " "Johnny B. Goode, " and "Sweet Little Sixteen." Berry's career rise was meteoric; but his fall came equally quickly, when his relations with an underage girl led to his conviction. It was not his first (nor his last) run in with the law. He scored his biggest hit in the early '70s with the comical (and some would say decidedly lightweight) song "My Ding-a-Ling." The following decades brought hundreds of nights of tours, with little attention from the recording industry. Bruce Pegg offers the definitive, though not always pretty, portrait of one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, a story that will appeal to all fans of American popular music.

1

The Vílle

They'd been chastened since birth by the scorn and violence the race had known. They'd been brought up on lynchings and riots, name-calling and “No Colored Allowed.” The neighborhood had saved them, they thought. With the Negro-owned businesses, the hairdressers and laundry, the school teachers and the shadows of the great trees, the neighborhood had sheltered them from what they knew was on the outside: the white people.

—Ntozake Shange, Betsey Brown

In the early part of the twentieth century, the neighborhood known as the Ville, just a few miles north and west of downtown St. Louis and the Mississippi River, profoundly shaped the lives of all who grew up in it. During its heyday, from the early 1920s to the 1940s, the Ville was a self-contained island of black enterprise and culture in a vast white, segregated ocean. “There were restaurants, movies, nightclubs, and schools,” Demosthenes Dubose, a former teacher, recalled: “There was the Amytis Theater in the Poro College building on Pendleton; the Douglas Theater on Whittier and Finney, and the crème de la crème, the Comet Theater on Sarah and Finney.” There were churches and small, family-owned stores and businesses; the Poro College building alone housed, at various times, a cosmetology school, a hotel, a law school, a post office, and the headquarters of the National Negro Business League. With the opening of the Homer G. Phillips hospital on Whittier in 1937, residents of the Ville could be born, educated, trained, employed, housed, nourished, entertained, and healed both physically and spiritually all within a six-by-nine-block area. “Everybody lived in the Ville,” remembered record-store owner Ted Hudson. “Teachers lived next door to steelworkers. Steelworkers lived down the street from postal workers. Your doctor lived around the corner. In fact, everything was in that community. And it stayed in that community until the mid-′50s.”

It was this way by necessity; because the white culture would not admit entry, the Ville provided everything necessary for black families to survive and grow from cradle to grave. But the realities of segregation were never far from the neighborhood. Ivan James's experience seemed typical. “As children,” the engineer remembered, “we were never put in a situation where we had to run up against segregation. All of our activities were limited within the family, within the neighborhood. We had a neighborhood show that was within walking distance. I never thought about going downtown.”

John Wright, now an assistant school superintendent, agreed:

When we moved to … the outskirts of the Ville, things were quite segregated. But we were shielded from a lot. We programmed our life around segregation. When my mother took me downtown, we ate before we left, and we ate when we got back home. We had a movie theater in the Ville so we didn't have to go to sit in the back of a white theater. We knew we couldn't go west of Grand Avenue, so all our activities—church, school, theater—were confined to the Ville.

St. Louis's attitude toward race, and the creation of the Ville itself, is rooted in the history of Missouri. Although Thomas Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803—that great swath of America which encompassed the country's heartland between the Mississippi River and the Rockies—did much to provide the foundations of the young nation, it also made the country once again face the contradiction of slavery in a democracy. Specifically, the government had to decide whether the territory should allow slavery or be free, and Missouri's application to join the Union in 1819 became Congress's litmus test. When the Senate rejected an antislavery bill passed by the House, the disagreement paved the way for what became known as the Missouri Compromise; the following year, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, while Maine was admitted as free. As a farther part of the compromise, the remainder of the territory north of Missouri's southern boundary was designated as “forever prohibited” to slavery. In so doing, Congress had ensured an equal balance of free and slave states, although it had postponed the inevitable decision on slavery's legality for a later date.

But if slavery found a champion in the state of Missouri, it faced one of its most dramatic challenges in the city of St. Louis. In 1846—just a few years after Cellie Johnson, Chuck Berry's paternal great-grandmother, was born into slavery on the Wolfolk plantation in Kentucky, and Charles Henry Banks, his maternal grandfather, was born into slavery on the Banks Plantation in the Oklahoma Territory—a slave by the name of Dred Scott, along with his wife, filed petitions in the St. Louis courthouse charging that they had been illegally deprived of their freedoms. Although their first suits failed, a subsequent suit was affirmed by the Missouri State Supreme Court in 1850. In the next few years, the suit was overturned by the same state court; a second suit was introduced and denied by the U.S. Circuit Court in Missouri before being heard twice by the U.S. Supreme Court. On March 6, 1856, the Supreme Court affirmed the Circuit Court opinion. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, writing the opinion, declared that Negroes could not be citizens of a state or, by implication, of the United States, because they were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and … held no rights and privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might chose to grant them.” Negroes, according to Taney, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” and were “altogether unfit to associate with the white race.”

The implications of the decision, of course, reached far beyond the city of St. Louis; it was, first and foremost, one of the factors that precipitated the Civil War. During the war, Missouri, as a border state, once again vacillated in its official stance on the issue of slavery. Although the Missouri militia fought on the confederate side, and Captain William Quantrill (along with future outlaws Frank and Jesse James) fought a number of bloody guerilla skirmishes on its western border against residents of the free-soil state of Kansas, the state never actually seceded from the Union. But the Dred Scott decision was never effectively overturned by the war. Despite the fact that slavery had been abolished and blacks were guaranteed the rights to citizenship and the vote, Taney's words shaped government policy and Supreme Court decisions on race for almost a century after they were written.

After the war, blacks in Missouri, as in many of the Southern states, initially made substantial gains. In 1870, for example, Cellie Johnson and her husband John were free to move from their Kentucky plantation to Missouri, where they rented a portion of the Bellefontaine Farm, a few miles outside the burgeoning city of St. Louis, and raised their five children. In 1890, one of those children, Lucinda, married William Berry, the son of a Tennessee slave and an Oklahoma Indian; five years later, Lucinda gave birth to Henry Berry, Chuck Berry's father. In 1894, his mother, Martha Bell Banks, was born to Charles and Lula Banks in Mississippi, the second of seven children.

But the family's progress, like the progress of all blacks born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was effectively halted by another Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson. The case, which was decided the year after Henry Berry's birth was an inevitable extension of Justice Taney's decision in the Dred Scott case and the almost 20 years of segregation between the races in the South following Reconstruction. It declared that, although the races were equal, as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, there were undeniable differences between them that necessitated segregation; specifically, the Court argued that all public facilities and institutions, providing they were equal, could be separate.

Missouri's historical ambivalence to racial issues meant that St. Louis was spared the more overt displays of racial violence that plagued other large cities at the time. However, the first half of the twentieth century was marked by quiet adherence to the “separate but equal” doctrine, and the city of St. Louis settled into a pattern of Jim Crow segregation. In downtown St. Louis, for example, blacks were simply not welcomed. The three major downtown department stores—Stix-Baer and Fuller, Famous Barr, and Scruggs-Vandevoort-Birney—employed no blacks “unless,” recalled Demosthenes DuBose, “they were running elevators or pushing a broom.” Two of the stores operated segregated lunch counters; at the third, “the only facility where blacks could eat,” according to DuBose, “was a waist-high counter … where blacks had to stand up and eat.” The Cardinals, one of St. Louis's major league baseball teams, barred blacks from the grandstand; in fact, the Cardinal players threatened to strike rather than play against Jackie Robinson, the first black major-league ball player, in his rookie year of 1947. The five major St. Louis movie theaters—the Loews, the American, the Ambassador, the Fox, and the St. Louis—all remained segregated until the 1950s. Hotels, too—including the Jefferson, Stader, and Chase—were closed to nonwhites.

But, as in many Southern states, blacks in St. Louis were not just separated from whites: They were seen as inferior, often as nothing more than creatures carrying disease. Until 1923, blacks traveling through St. Louis and finding themselves in Union Station for a few hours were routinely taken to a way station, where they were “vaccinated against any disease.” Chuck Berry himself recalls another practice of the St. Louis police department some decades later: They would stop multiracial couples and order mandatory shots for venereal disease.

Another particularly insidious manifestation of Jim Crow was the initiation of race-restrictive property covenants. In 1910, white property owners in St. Louis began entering into legally binding agreements with other white homeowners that stipulated parties were not to sell, lease, or rent property to blacks. Essentially, the tactic employed was to encircle a predominantly black neighborhood with covenant housing, thereby stopping the neighborhood's expansion into white areas as well as decreasing the amount of housing available to minorities.

A 1947 Fisk University study of race-restrictive covenants in Chicago and St. Louis identified the main area of covenanted properties in the city of St. Louis as a quadrangle “whose sides are represented by Vanderventer Avenue on the east, Kingshighway Boulevard on the west, Washington Boulevard on the south, and Carter Avenue on the north.” Because the area between Easton Avenue to the south (now Dr. Martin Luther King Drive) and Vanderventer Avenue was not sufficiently covenanted, the study noted, “openings in the buffer line of defense … have permitted a steady stream of Negro families to filter in and locate themselves in better housing.” This “permitted Negro settlement of the central part of this covenanted quadrangle, in blocks along Taylor, Newstead, Pendleton [now Billups Avenue], Goode [now Annie Malone Drive], Whittier, and Sarah” between Easton and St. Louis Avenue to the north; this was the area known as the Ville.

The area was originally settled by German and Italian immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century. But the appearance during Reconstruction of Elleardsville Colored School No. 8 (which was to become the Simmons Elementary School in 1891) and Sumner High School, and of two black churches—the Antioch Baptist and the St. James African Methodist Episcopal in 1884 and 1885, respectively—signified the beginnings of a strong black presence in the area. That presence was strengthened significantly by the property covenants and the great migration of blacks into St. Louis during World War I, when St. Louis, like so many industrial cities in America, saw huge influxes of black citizens hoping to take advantage of the large number of jobs the war effort had created. By 1925, the year before Chuck Berry's birth, the Ville had become home to some 6,000 residents, 90 percent of whom were black.

One of those immigrants to St. Louis was Martha Banks. Like the many blacks who arrived in St. Louis during that time, she had decided to leave her Mississippi home in search of employment in the North, perhaps harboring hopes of teaching at Sumner High School, which, as the first black high school west of the Mississippi River, would have been a magnet for her. In the spring of 1919, the Antioch Baptist Church witnessed her marriage to Henry Berry, who had moved from rural Bellefontaine to the city, more than likely also looking for better work. In short succession, daughter Thelma was born in July 1920. She was followed by brother Henry in February 1922, sister Lucy in April 1923 and another brother, Charles Edward Anderson Berry, on October 18, 1926. They set up home in a small house at 2520 Goode Avenue, a block north of Antioch Baptist, in an area Chuck Berry was later to describe as “a nicely kept area in the best of the three colored neighborhoods of St. Louis.”

Indeed, one can imagine a young Charles Berry leaving the small house on Goode and walking across the Tandy Park playground in the shadows of Sumner High, down tree-lined Pendleton Avenue, past “brick and frame cottages with well-cared lawns,” to the corner of Pendleton and St. Ferdinand. This was the hub of the Ville, where Sumner High School, St. James A.M.E. Church, the YMCA, and the Poro College building each occupied a corner. Continuing south on Pendleton, he may have stopped at the family-owned Morgan's Drug Store for a soda or a penny candy before crossing Pendleton to do errands at Wardlow's Grocery, McCrary's Meat Market, Woodward's Vegetable Market, or the Velour Dry Goods Store. Then he'd walk home east along North Market, past Dr. Cheatham's offices and the Orchid Beauty Parlor, before turning north at the corner where the Antioch Baptist Church stood and onto Goode Avenue.

So insular was this world that Charles Berry's first sight of white people was a tremendous shock. As a child of about 3, Berry recalled seeing white firemen sent to fight a blaze in a shed on Goode Avenue. The imaginative young child, incredulous that anyone could have a skin color so different, fancied that their faces had been “whitened from fear of going near the big fire.” Later, of course, the white world would become more familiar to him, but it would never be welcoming. His experiences at the Fox Theater and with the white families who paid for his father's contracting work were profound influences on him. For much of Berry's life, the white world would prove to be hostile and inaccessible.

But, by his own account, his childhood seemed fairly normal. The Berry family was dominated by his intelligent, yet unschooled father; the birth of the four children, and the subsequent births of brother Paul Lawrence Dunbar Berry in December 1933 and sister Martha in 1936, was interpreted by Berry as “Daddy's strategy to have Mother at home with their own children instead of out teaching someone else's.” But Berry's mother's influence was also deep. More than likely it was her decision to name the youngest Berry son after the poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar. A key figure in African-American literature, Dunbar may not have been the first poet to write in the black dialect, but he did, in the words of one critic, write “sophisticated dialect verse that located the black speaker, uniquely for Dunbar's time, at the center of experience.” Significantly, his 1895 poem, “The Mask,” propelled him to national fame with black and white audiences alike.

Both parents were industrious and deeply religious, Henry becoming a deacon at Antioch Baptist and Martha singing hymns while doing housework. With such a strong Baptist background, Henry and Martha Berry were also strong disciplinarians, and Berry records a number of beatings administered by them throughout his childhood and adolescence. Certainly, Berry himself proved to be a handful as he got older and seems to have been involved in a number of scrapes at Cottage Avenue School. He recounts one story of receiving a caning in second grade (for pasting letters spelling St. Louis on his forehead); his third-grade teacher, Melba Sweets, recalled him as being “one of the worst kids I ever knew…. He was so bad that he was going to take me on one day by walking out of the room. No kid had ever tried me before. I told him, in the sternest voice I could muster, ‘YOU WILL BE SORRY IF YOU WALK OUT OF THIS ROOM.’ It worked, and he turned around and went back to his seat.”

But one teacher in particular seemed to have an impact on the young boy, as she did on everyone who came into contact with her; that teacher was Julia Davis, who taught Berry in the seventh and eighth grades at Simmons Elementary School. Davis was a strict disciplinarian, and the young Charles Berry realized immediately that the kind of antics for which he had been noted just a few years earlier would no longer be acceptable. “She's a Baptist, but she was like a Catholic nun in the classroom,” Berry recalled in 1991, on the occasion of Davis's 100th birthday. “She taught in the avenue of perfection; we tried to come close.” But more important than the way Julia Davis kept her pupils under control were the lessons they learned. Davis taught an Afrocentric curriculum, remarkable for its time, stressing the history and achievements of blacks both local and national. “These were things that weren't even mentioned in our textbooks,” recalled George Hyram, a St. Louis teacher and himself a former student of Davis's in the 1930s. “It was certainly a source of pride in self to find out that, even if our history books didn't mention it, we had made contributions to our country.”

Quite possibly it was under Julia Davis's tutelage that Berry came into contact with the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, the great black educator and spokesman. At the end of the nineteenth century, Washington laid out a blueprint for black economic success and racial harmony in the twentieth century. If blacks concentrated on vocational, practical trades, he reasoned in his 1899 work The Future of the American Negro, and produced “something that makes the white man partly dependent upon the Negro instead of the dependence being on the other side, [then] a change for the better takes place in the relations of the races.” It is, he argued, through “the trades, the commercial life, largely, that the Negro is to find his way to respect and confidence.”

But if Charles Berry did not formally learn this through Davis's teachings, or from his mother, whose college education would undoubtedly have acquainted her with the leading black thinkers of the time, it was a philosophy that lay all around him. It lay in the businesses of the Ville, which prospered independently of the white world that surrounded them. More important, it lay at the heart of his father's contracting business. Even if Henry Berry could not articulate Washington's philosophy in the way that his wife or Julia Davis did, every day that he got into his truck and subcontracted for the white-owned Drozda Realty Company or performed house repairs in one of the nearby white neighborhoods, he lived Washington's vision of the future of black America. Regardless of where Charles Berry learned them, Washington's ideas—that blacks, in the short run, should learn trades rather than immediately striving toward middle-class professions; that they should do so independently within their own community; and that black eco...